Piotr Kamler
In Search of Time

December 31 2018

I remember when I first saw a film by the Polish animator Piotr Kamler. It was so completely unalike to conventionally linear and text-based narratives and I immediately felt that I had found something timelessly novel and unique. Kamler’s protagonists seem to explore the unfathomable and mysterious relationship between movement and time, matter and space.

First I wanna present Kamler’s only full length film which took an astonishing five years to complete between 1977 and 1982: Chronopolis, an Egyptian-flavored cybernetic opus that immediately sucks you into a transcendent alternate universe with its own laws of physics, space, time, and dream-logic.

The version below is shortened to half of the original duration, but it’s the only one I could embed. You can watch the full movie here. I also found a version with a haunting alternative ambient score, which I like so much that I would recommend to watch this first:

Chronopolis — An Alternative Score


Chronopolis, 1983 (extract)

And here’s another short film, the one that made me discover this genius.

Une Mission Éphémère, 1993